Cerebras Systems (NASDAQ: CBRS) plans to expand its AI infrastructure footprint in Europe, with its first data centre capacity in the region expected to come online by the end of 2026.

The company is planning a rapid buildout across France and the Nordics, with total capacity expected to reach 200MW by the end of 2027. Part of that capacity is expected to support OpenAI workloads under the companies’ existing partnership.

The expansion will bring its AI inference infrastructure closer to European users, reducing latency for more complex AI workloads, the company said on Thursday.

Andrew Feldman, co-founder and CEO of Cerebras, said the company is contracting significant capacity for 2027, with data centres planned in Norway and Finland as Cerebras builds across Europe. 

“These deployments will enable us to move decisively on what our customers have been asking for: fast, high-performance AI compute located in Europe.”

Demand for local AI infrastructure has grown in Europe as companies, research institutions and governments look for lower-latency compute capacity and alternatives to infrastructure concentrated in the US and Asia.

Cerebras said its wafer-scale architecture is designed to support AI inference and training workloads, with the European buildout intended to serve customers from within the region.

Feldman said customers want AI compute to be closer to home, available quickly and powered responsibly. He added that the expansion reflects Cerebras’ confidence in Europe as a long-term growth market.

Cerebras Systems develops AI computing infrastructure for training and inference workloads. Its customers include corporations, research institutions and government organisations.

The European expansion follows recent data centre activity by Cerebras in the US. In May, AI data centre infrastructure operator Digi Power X signed a master services agreement with Cerebras for the colocation of a purpose-built 40MW data centre campus in Columbiana, Alabama.

The initial 10-year term is valued at about US$1.1 billion, with the potential contract value rising to US$2.5 billion if renewal options are exercised.

Cerebras has also appointed Miguel Sequera, a former AWS and Vantage Data Centers executive, to support the buildout of its global data centre portfolio.